Growing up my mom was a kindergarten teach at the Madill Early Childhood Center. The ECC was only for kindergarten and first grade. For the first twelve years of my life that building was a part of my everyday routine. I would go there very morning with my mom, leave to go to my class, then come right back after school. I really enjoyed it there because I had many friends who were also teachers kids that I would play with after school. It was really fun to have the entire school basically to yourself at that age. However, the older I got the less I wanted to go there. By the time I was in high school I hardly ever went there. It was not as enjoyable as it used to be.

Mitchell Stroud

Blog 4

For my final personal blog, I chose the Ten Eyck boathouse on Lake Onondaga in Syracuse, New York. For me, this symbolized the culmination of 6 years of hard work. I started rowing in 7^th grade for fun and to lose weight but I never expected it to lead to rowing for the 10^th ranked university in the US for rowing or rowing in college in general. The lessons that I learned in just one year rival the 6 years of lessons I learned while rowing in middle and high school. I was given a rare opportunity by being recruited here. I was not nearly as fast as the rest of the freshmen that were recruited with me, but I was eager to prove myself and gain fitness. I would like to say that I gave it everything I had, but rowing taught me to never make excuses and that just feels like an excuse to me. Most of the year I was nursing an injured back and I made the decision that the benefit of rowing for 3 more years did not outweigh the cost of permanent back problems. I could write for days about how hard that decision was to make and how it made me feel, but I’ll summarize it to this: I gained a second family up there that year, and being stripped away from that and the sport I dedicated my teenage years to is very painful.

But enough of the sob story, let’s talk about how cool the boathouse is. You would think that coming from the Chesapeake boathouse here in OKC to this more traditional, no frills boathouse, that I wouldn’t like it. This could not be further from the truth. Walking into the boathouse, you are immediately hit with a wave of history and nostalgia. From old oars hanging on the wall, to the trophy case in the corner, you feel overwhelmed by the amount of hard work and dedication that this building was essential to. The boathouse has an actual house attached to it, and the head coach lives in there to keep an eye on everything. They would always string up Christmas lights upon the pillars and the balcony that overlook the inlet where we would launch the boats. It was always beautiful to see the lights from the water as we would end a tough practice and carry the boats back into their bay.

Mitchell Stroud

Blog 3

The building I picked for this blog is my high school, Harding Charter Preparatory High School (HCP). I have a whirlwind of emotions about this building. Unfortunately, HCP was forced to relocate under the “pathway to greatness” project. It might have been built in 1925 and still had asbestos in it (we were assured it was properly quarantined), but it was rich with history and character.

I did not start to truly understand how much this school meant to me until I graduated. Freshman year was a huge transition. The first two and a half years there I absolutely despised it. I complained that there was so much homework and I never had any free time. I did not see where all of the work was leading to until the last year and a half. My junior year I started to realize how all of the work that I had done over the past 3 years fell into place. I was taking college level classes that made it so much easier now that I am in college. I started to look at other schools’ high school curriculum and realized how much more that HCP taught me. This made the transition into college much easier. I already knew good study skills and how to write cohesive thoughts. These things that thought were common among college freshmen actually allowed me to stand out and excel in classes that my peers were struggling with. Finally, it gave me the academic resume to pursue college athletics at Syracuse University. Although I got injured my freshman year there, I would not have been able to get there without the work that I put in during high school.

Overall, apart from the visual appeal to this building, it became a symbol of the community and comradery that I formed with my peers while also gaining a top notch education.

Mitchell Stroud

ARCH 3013

Blog assignment 2

For my first blog assignment I talked about my home. This blog is about a building I spent more time in than my own home during high school, The Chesapeake boathouse in the boathouse district. Unlike my actual home that was filled with only good memories, the boathouse was quite different.

I absolutely adored the boathouse district the moment I set foot there in 7^th grade. However, rowing for the next 5 years, I would come to learn the true, gilded nature of the district. I loved the large bay doors and oddly industrial but sleek design of the buildings. They were beautiful and purpose-built. The large, open bays held millions of dollars of rowing equipment and looked good while doing it, in theory.

The sad reality of the district is poor management and upkeep. As you mentioned in class, the facilities are world class and the USRowing High Performance team does train here out of the Devon boathouse. The rapids are great for international kayaking competitions, but made them too difficult for the average consumer, on the off chance that they had the rapids running. Furthermore, the single stall of the men’s bathroom in the Chesapeake boathouse was broken for an entire year and a half before it was replaced.

All of this is to say that I made my second family with the other rowers that rowed here, and we saw the potential that these facilities had. But we also saw these facilities be beaten down and fall into disorder. I have too many demotivating stories to share all in this blog, but I am glad for what the district fostered. As much as I disagree with its management and their sketchy legality, they did bring provide the necessary tools for us to grow as a rowing program and we got some impressive results from that. However, if we had the ability to row for another team, the majority would have.

Mitchell Stroud

ARCH 3013

Blog Assignment 1

My Parent’s House

I thought I would start these blogs off pretty easy by starting with my parent’s house. They have had the house over 25 years, and they bought it as a fixer upper. The two things I always hear them say about the house when talking with friends or new people are that the house was one of the first California contemporary homes in Oklahoma and how there was purple shag carpet in the bathroom.

Of course, there is the obvious meaning of this house being my childhood home, but beyond that it functions as a mental time capsule so to speak. Now that all three of their kids have moved out of the house, whenever we all visit it takes me back to when I was a little pest and my older brothers would pick on me. Whenever I go home, I feel like I can completely be myself. I do not have to maintain a façade of having my life together or act neighborly. I see my parent’s house as a sort of vacation. Although when I am there it is usually breaks from school and some weekends, but I feel like I can fade away from the real world and float in a suspended state of relaxation and good times. Unlike many aspects of my life, my parent’s house is the only place where I only think of happy memories. The good memories always shine through when I’m thinking about their house, whereas other parts of my life I have to remind myself to see the positive instead of dwell on the negative.

Overall, from the purple shag carpets my parents removed while renovating it, to the loving memories that its wall elicit, my parent’s house functions as so much more than the wood, glass, sheetrock, and concrete that it is made of.

AT&T Stadium is where I went to my first NFL game. It is significant to me because not only was it my first NFL game experience, but also it an amazing architectural structure. I remember how in awe I was simply because of how massive the building actually is. I remember looking around and wondering how do you even begin to plan and coordinate the construction of something like that. The number of people it could hold and all of the surrounding monitors and screens truly amazed me.

The experience also has some negative memories tied to it because Dallas lost that game. I remember leaving the game a little upset because of that but it still all in all it was a very good memorable experience.

Minute Maid Park has always meant a lot to me. My first encounter with is was when I was around 5, and I absolutely loved baseball. I was overwhelmed by how big the venue was and how it was able to fit an entire baseball field inside. I was also amazed by how the roof could be stored away and the field could be exposed to the world. It meant a lot to be there. I was able to watch the sport I loved with the people I loved. The building meant less to me at 5 years old than it does now, but the intangibles of the building and the way it made me feel are things I will never be able to replicate.

The Mitch Park YMCA opened in 2014 and is absolutely beautiful in my opinion. I went here quite a bit and have good memories of making friends and having fun. I love the aesthetic of the building and also the surroundings. All the windows and curvy design of the building make it look very modern as well as give it a great view of all the running trails surrounded by green trees and grassy areas.

That part of Edmond has seen a lot of business developments built recently as well so everything surrounding the YMCA is fairly new. This makes the area very attractive for all kinds of people and created a great atmosphere for hanging out, being active, and meeting new people.

In Antalya and its surroundings, postmodernism, which has become unvariegated in most areas of social and cultural life, has been rendered visible in its most superficial aspect. The design of Minicity Park, in which will be distributed 1:25 scale models of buildings from different regions of Turkey, confronted us as an actual product which conforms to all the scenarios for attractiveness regarding will, which is gradually eroding the grandeurs of the different areas of high culture and in its place is increasingly pumping in the consumption of signs and images.

This building is have amazing components indoor and outdoor. Outdoor is designed very modern. A fragmented, angular plan is faced on the south side by a long, high wall, which fulfills the client’s desire to separate the commercial and recreational functions of the building from those of the theme park. The architect describes the building as a “series of shells that constitute their own specificity.” Broken or “torn” at several points, the rear of the building allows for terraces on the side, where the scale models are located. On the western side, the building is “detached from the ground, somewhere between dividing and not dividing the interior and exterior”.

This project was one of the works short-listed among the finalists and featured in the traveling exhibition in 2005 for the EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE/ MIES VAN DER ROHE AWARD

This building gives me feeling like Emre was already living in future. In 2005 he designed very modern theme park. Maybe future architects are influenced by his work. This is my favorite design

Two summers ago I visited Italy and I specifically loved the Piazza Grande. This was the first time I had been out of the country as well as my first time seeing these different styles of architecture in person. I remember being in the middle of the Piazza Grande and feeling like I was in a movie. I had seen pictures of it before but seeing it all firsthand was truly breathtaking. There was something about the whole experience that made me see architecture different and if I’m being honest I don’t feel like I truly appreciated architecture until after this experience.